“There it all is again as I’m telling it to you, come back as fresh and clear as if I was looking at it now: a nice little old-fashioned church, with a stone wall round the yard, where the graves lay pretty thick and close, but all looking green and flowery and old, a great clump of the biggest and oldest yew-trees I ever saw, and a tall thick hedge separating the churchyard from the clergyman’s house. The sun was shining brightly, turning the moss-covered roofs of the church and vicarage into gold; from the trees close by came the faint twittering of birds, and away past the village houses bathed in the bright afternoon sunshine there were the fields of crimson clover, and the banks full of golden broom and gorse. Over all was a sense of such peace and silence that it seemed as if there was nothing terrible, only a quiet sadness in the funeral, with its few mourners round the open grave, and the grey-haired clergyman standing by; and last of all, when Mary and I went up and looked into the grave, and read on the coffin-plate, ‘Aged 77.’ one couldn’t help feeling that the poor soul had only gone to sleep tired with a long life.
“It was my fancy perhaps, but as we strolled round that churchyard, and read a tombstone here and a board there, it seemed as if no sooner had the parson gone in to take off his surplice, and the mourners left the churchyard, than the whole place woke up again into busy life. A chaffinch came and jerked out its bit of a song in one of the yews, the Guinea-fowls in a farm close by set up their loud crying, the geese shrieked on the green, and creaking, and rattling and bumping, there came along a high-filled waggon of the sweetest hay that ever was caught in loose handfuls by the boughs of the trees, and then fell softly back into the road.
“We were very quiet, Mary and I, as we strolled out of the churchyard, down one of the lanes; and then crossing a stile, we went through a couple of fields, and sat down on another stile, with the high hedge on one side of us and the meadow, that they were beginning to mow at the other end, one glorious bed of flowers and soft feathery grass.
“‘Polly,’ I says at last, breaking the silence, ‘ain’t this heavenly?’
“‘And you feel better?’ she says, laying her hand on mine.
“‘Better!’ I says, taking a long draught of the soft sweet-scented air, and filling my chest—‘better, old girl! I feel as if I was growing backwards into a boy.’
“‘And you fifty last week!’ she says.
“‘Yes,’ I says, smiling, ‘and you forty-seven next week.’ And then we sat thinking for a bit.
“‘Polly,’ I says at last, as I sat there drinking in that soft breeze, and feeling it give me strength, ‘it’s worth being ill only to feel as I do now.’
“For you see I’d been very bad, else I dare say I’m not the man to go hanging about churchyards and watching funerals: I’m a stoker, and my work lies in steamers trading to the East. I’d come home from my last voyage bad with fever, caught out in one of those nasty hot bad-smelling ports—been carried home to die, as my mates thought; and it was being like this, and getting better, that had set me thinking so seriously, and made me so quiet; not that I was ever a noisy sort of man, as any one who knows me will say. And now, after getting better, the doctor had said I must go into the country to get strength; so as there was no more voyaging till I was strong, there was nothing for it but to leave the youngsters under the care of the eldest girl and a neighbour, and come and take lodgings out in this quiet Surrey village.